Walmart Sex Discrimination Claims Filed By 2,000 Women

[Catherina]

Walmart Sex Discrimination Claims Filed By 2,000 Women

Posted: 06/06/2012

...

May 25 was the deadline for women in most states to file charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that litigates on behalf of workers against employers. EEOC charges were filed by 1,975 Walmart women before the deadline. Under most laws enforced by the EEOC, plaintiffs must file a charge with the agency before bringing a job discrimination lawsuit. The filings mean women who say Walmart systematically favors men for raises and promotions can individually pursue lawsuits, even though a class-action lawsuit against Walmart was turned away last summer by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Charges were filed in every state except Montana and Vermont (the latter has only four Walmart stores, the fewest of any state). Women in Florida, Alabama and Georgia filed the most claims. Lawyers said they hope the filings will lead to new regional class-action lawsuits. Plaintiffs in last year's failed class-action have already launched new class-action suits in California and Texas courts.

“The fact that EEOC charges were filed in every single Walmart region in the nation demonstrates the widespread and pervasive nature of Walmart’s pay and promotion discrimination against its women employees,” said Brad Seligman, a lead attorney for the women, in a statement.

...

The filings with the EEOC could also provoke that agency to launch its own investigation into Walmart. The EEOC has sued Walmart in the past, independently of the Dukes case. In 2010, Walmart settled a lawsuit brought by the EEOC, paying $11.7 million in back wages and compensation damages to women in London, Ky., who were denied jobs because of their sex.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/walmart-sex-discrimination-women-_n_1575859.html

[Neoma]

1. Sigh...

I haven't gone to Wal-Mart since I moved up north. That's all I can do.

What frustrates me is that it reminds me of my uncle encouraging me to work there because he "knew someone" and then blamed my mom for my attitude towards Wal-Mart.

He loves to watch Bill O'reily. That's really all I have to say, isn't it?

[Catherina]

3. Yes, that's all you need to say.

Walmart is down here now. Out of curiosity, I walked into one last month just to see. It's as barbaric and exploitative as ever. Hate them.

[Zorra]

2. "women in London, Ky., who were denied jobs because of their sex."

"EEOC charges were filed by 1,975 Walmart women before the deadline"

Why?

From the OP:

"Managers ... have the ultimate authority whether, and by how much, to adjust the pay of all hourly employees,” the plaintiffs wrote in early March. They "have long known about gender disparities yet have failed to take remedial action."

From a previous article:

Wal-Mart’s numbers] are not in question. Women comprise more than 65 percent of hourly employees, but only 34.5 percent of managers. This is significantly different from similar retail chains, in which women hold 56.5 percent of management jobs. It takes women on average 4.38 years to rise to a management post at Wal-Mart, but takes men only 2.86 years. Of 41 Wal-Mart regional vice presidents, only five are women, and only 9.8 percent of Wal-Mart’s district managers are women. Wal-Mart’s internal documents acknowledge that they are far behind the rest of their field.
snip---
Certainly, there has been some blatantly sexist behavior among Wal-Mart managers, such as management meetings in which men called their female colleagues “little Janie Qs.” But mostly, Wal-Mart’s system runs on silence. Silence about what exactly are the criteria for management positions; silence about the additional subjective criteria that individual managers apply for promotion; silence about the actual availability of management positions; silence about how you decide whether to give an employee a raise of 10 or 25 cents per hour. Male managers fill all that silence, the plaintiffs’ lawyers and expert witnesses said, with subjective decisions that are often influenced by stereotypes.

*sigh*

[stevenleser]

4. They had to do this because they were denied class action status by an inadequate law

This whole situation makes me furious. I almost threw my laptop against a wall when I researched this last time to write this article: http://democratsforprogress.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=6655

.
.
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The women who brought suit had a very strong statistical argument that women at Walmart were getting fewer promotions than men and were getting paid less than men. Virtually every judge at every level agreed that at least individually or in small groups, the women have a case. In fact, there is an entry in the supreme court's decision that reads, “Women fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs in the retailer's stores but make up only '33 percent of management employees'...[T]he higher one looks in the organization the lower the percentage of women...The plaintiffs' “largely uncontested descriptive statistics” also show that women working in the company's stores “are paid less than men in every region” and “that the salary gap widens over time even for men and women hired into the same jobs at the same time.”

As a layperson, your reaction to the above paragraph is probably like mine. “Well, if they were able to show that there was a company wide issue where women were not receiving equal pay for equal work and were denied promotions, and virtually every judge at every level agreed with this, why was there an issue with 23(a)(2) “there are questions of law or fact common to the class”?

The reason is that the standard you need to meet is pretty high. You need to show a memo or email or some directive from corporate indicating that what is happening is the policy of the company. Here is where the catch 22 comes in. Unless you have a class action suit, it is very difficult to get the kind of discovery (the legal term for ability to compel a company to turn over emails, documents, etc), you need to prove a case like this. So you cannot get a class action suit certified without the evidence and you cannot get the evidence without a class action. The common man is stuck and once again the large corporation is holding all of the cards.

This is my main concern with what happened here. The law is inadequate. I have no doubt that the justices applied the law properly here. The catch 22 I illustrated above is infuriating. Added to that is that the burdens of 23(a)(2) are obviously too high. If a company has a culture that has fostered the companywide discrimination that the women who brought suit were able to show without a dispute, it should be held responsible. If the law and legal system cannot do that then the law and legal system have failed. Adding insult to injury is the way Justice Scalia phrased the problem with the plaintiff's case in his opinion, “In a company of Wal-Mart's size and geographical scope, it is quite unbelievable that all managers would exercise their discretion in a common way without some common direction.”

[Neoma]

5. "The law is inadequate."

Ain't that the truth...

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Walmart is horrid.

Ugh.